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Homeworking in the Long Term: Managing Employees’ Mental Wellbeing
- #COVID19
- #Homeworking
- #Mental Health
- #OH&S
Plan
Ensure Human Resource and Health and Safety departments work collaboratively in producing clear and transparent homeworking policies. Set goals for the management of psychosocial risks and ensure managers have clear roles and responsibilities towards reducing stress at work. You should integrate psychosocial risks into your COVID-secure risk assessment, as it is not unrelated. Recognising the problem is part of the solution.Do
Effectively communicate your homeworking policy and consult with workers in how to make homeworking workable and acceptable. They will all have their own personal story of how they coped at initial lockdown, and their personal solutions might be helpful to others in their teams. Early intervention will help to reduce the impact of psychosocial risk. Mental health awareness training should be offered in how to build personal resilience and how to recognise signs amongst others. According to IOSH 69% of line managers have not been trained in how to recognise poor mental health. Training is also part of the solution. Soften the impact by supporting employees suffering from poor mental health. Support them with confidential helplines, employee assistance programmes and (if you have them) mental health first aiders. Videoconferencing is now the method of choice for communicating with homeworkers. Some companies have started to use videoconferencing for morale boosting sessions. During paid time at the end of the week, they organise a social get-together where workers join in an informal gathering, with work conversations being strictly off the agenda.Check
How are your co-workers coping? Look, listen and talk to them. Ask them ‘on a range of 1 to 10 how are you coping with your work?’ and be prepared for a conversation about this, don’t move hastily on. If their response is complicated or difficult to gauge, before concluding the meeting, make a plan to continue the conversation at a later date and meanwhile ask them to write down some specific issues to talk through next time. Homeworking policies should now be well enough developed that we can start monitoring and auditing them, and this will include a review of the management of psychosocial risks.Act
There will be gaps or deficiencies in your system of ‘plan, do and check’ which can be acted upon and improved. Can senior managers allocate additional resources necessary to manage psychosocial risks? Flexible work patterns designed to combine work activity with family commitments can reap rewards. There is approximately a four-fold return for any investment in mental wellbeing. Our workers should be our best resource and they deserve positive action and compassion to support them in a VUCA landscape.
Join our LinkedIn discussion group, COVID-19 HSE Red-on-line Experts Forum, to share your experiences and best practices relative to the novel coronavirus with fellow EHS professionals and the Red-on-line team.